A Typology of Islands - Part One

[The Island of the Dead - Arnold Bocklin ]

Why are we fascinated by islands? An island is a single thing. It has a prelapsarian simplicity that tells us that meanings are clear, that identities are fixed, that the way ahead is mapped out for us; that we are safe.

If there are apriori faculties in our minds that recognise truth, beauty, logical identity, or, why not? God , than I imagine that an island is a mirror in which we can see these reflected. The arithmetic and geometry of an island switches us on at a very deep level – its number (one) and its shape confirm that we are in the world, that we are not alone in the world and that we belong there.

To look at it from a post-lapsarian point of view, islands encourage flights of romantic fancy such as that in the last two paragraphs. They are symptomatic of loss. If an island is a mirror it reflects as much horror as it does joy.

One way or another, islands are rarely just islands. I am talking here about islands as they are put to work in literature, art, music and film. They are magical, wild, tormenting, consoling, revitalising, terrifying places. They are places where normal rules – legal, moral, physical, existential and so on – do not apply.  They are simulacra of the ‘normal’ world (in both derivative and autonomous senses) that, even if they insult and terrorise us, they do so by seduction. This seduction is rooted in the indiscriminate and protean human sympathy for islands that I mentioned at the beginning.

The Island as a Political Restoration The Tempest,  William Shakespeare (1611)

The Tempest is Shalespeare’s last written play. The Duke of Milan, Prospero, has been usurped of his title and power by his brother, Antonio and has come to an island in exile with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero  may have been overthrown in the real world, but on this island, normal rules do not apply. Where previously he’d been vulnerable because of his interest in art and philosophy and consequent neglect of the darker political arts, here he is absolute ruler.

He rules through magic and he has enslaved the native sprites and spirits – Caliban, the half-human son of a witch is in his thrall as is Ariel the wood sprite. Ariel in particular, does Prospero’s bidding in manipulating the shipwrecked sailors to bend to his master's design and will.

The shipwrecked sailors include the King of Naples and his son as well as Prospero’s own brother, Antonio.

As Caliban points out to some of the vistors (with whom he wants to join forces to liberate himself from Prospero’s rule), this is an enchanted island: “The isle is full of noises/Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”

The pleasantness of the island is obvious to Ferdinand, the son of the King of Naples: “Let me live here ever! So rare a wondered father and a wise makes place paradise” He falls in love (with more than a little help from Prospero’s magic) with Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. However, this island is not a place where one can stay. Proepero’s intentions are entirely worldly, His goal in marrying his daughter and the heir to the kingdom of Naples is to re-enter political life in his native Italy.

Accordingly, his strictures for his daughter’s marriage to Ferdinard are straight out of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians in their prohibition of fornication and veneration of marriage: this is a very, very conservative and serious plan, despite the magic, sprites and trickery:

If thou dost break her virgin knot before

All sanctimonious ceremonies may

With full and holy rite be ministered,

No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall

To make this contract grow, but barren hate,

Sour-eyed disdain, and discord shall bestrew

The union of your bed with weeds so loathly

That you shall hate it both.

Prospero knows that he cannot stay here. The respected counsellor, Gonzalo sees this too: “All torment, trouble, wonder and amazement/Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us out of this fearful country”

So, once Prospero has used magic to restore his earthy power renounces that magic. He has chastened the erstwhile usurper and will return to his own country where normal rules – political, sexual, succession, physical – will apply again.

By the end of the play the island has served its function: It has restored the natural order.

The Island as the Forge of Heroism The Odyssey Homer (8th Century BC)

The world of Homer is not that of Shakespeare. Magic permeates the Odyssey. There is no return to a ‘normal world’ because home is just as fantastic as what lies over the horizon. It is understood that the gods can intervene in the lives of human beings anywhere, anytime.

The islands that Odysseus encounters are fantastic, incredible places – not unlike Prospero’s island – but no-one bats an eyelid at the basic realities that are confronted. The islands in The Odyssey do not restore the natural order of a putative home place. This is because, despite all of Odysseus’ and Telemachus’ grieving over the loss of home nostalgia is not as powerful as excitement!

Odysseus wants to go home. But the thing is, he wants not to go home much more. The forging of hero status through adventure is the point of the journey – not the ostensible return to Ithaca.

The Odyssey starts off with Ulysses on an island, imprisoned by Calypso and kept from home by Poseidon. This island – Ogygia/Atalntis – can’t be all that bad. Odysseus stays there for seven years. For a man of his immense prowess this is far too long an exile to be endured without some degree of consent on his part.

You might think that in a story about the loss of a beloved home place and wife every island which is visited will be more or less a prison or scourge of some kind. Not so: these islands –  each is memorable in its own way – are pretexts for adventure.

The Odyssey is a story about a man who is too busy, too heroic to be homesick. These islands are purely excuses for heroic adventure.

For example, the islands of the Lotus Eaters and the Cyclops (Book 9) have dangers of their own kinds – the former robs Odysseus’ men of their will to turn for home by drugging them; the latter is a bounteous place (“His cheese-racks were loaded with cheeses, and he had more lambs and kids than his pens could hold”) that is guarded by Polyphemus, the Cyclops. This Cyclops is a true monster.  He has no fear of the Gods and manages to devour six of Odysseus’ men before the hero outwits him.

The part when Polyphemus, drunk on wine given to him by Odysseus, vomits out huge lumps of partially digested human flesh is memorable. The island serves its typical Odyssean function:  a wonderful story has been told that has, because of its island setting, a uniqueness, a ‘galaopogean’ identity that burns it into the memory of anyone who hears it.

The islands of The Odyssey, are, in contrast with that of The Tempest islands of unrestrained fun and joy.

I will return to The Odyssey in later posts about islands!

An Island of Torture and the Ultimate Cinematic Taboo Shutter Island Director Michael Scorsese  (2010)

The island in this film is not one of joy.  Neither is does it serve a political/remedial function in addressing deficits in the rules of the normal world. This island, this film is a prison. The walls of this prison are made from the terrible pain of insanity and the nightmare crimes of infanticide and the Nazi death Camps.

The beginning of this film uses music and photography to terrify the audience. The effect is to mark the introduction to the audience of the island itself as a damned location. The moment the ferry heaves out of the fog under an angry sky on the way to the island we know we’re being transported to somewhere other.  The portentous foghorns and Trombone set the scene before we ever get there. When it is finally presented it is an ominous sight:

A single, throbbing note is sounded out by the fog horn; this motif gains volume and intensity as the ferry pulls into the wharf:  The fog horn is amplified by a trombone, French Horn, Trumpet and recorded tapes– the music is “Fog Tropes” by the American composer, Ingram Marshall:

The sense of foreboding created is unsubtle but stylistically gothic, almost the stuff of horror movies. One thing is clear – this island is a very sinister place. Scorsese manages to create the cinematic version of “Lasciate Ogni Spreanza voi che entrate” or, more appropriately “Arbeit Macht Frei”.

The scene set, this island of despair delineated, the story begins: Two federal Marshalls have come to the Top Security Psychiatric Institution for severely damaged and highly dangerous inmates on the island to investigate the disappearance of a patient.

The men investigate. They do not make much headway, however. Soon the weather turns against them. Everything seems to conspire to imprison the men on the island. There is a terrible storm - a kind of pathetic fallacy on steroids – in which the men are nearly killed. This island seems to have a sinister intelligence that  reminds me of the (far inferior) TV series, Lost.

Gradually, Leonardo Di Caprio’s character is revealed not to be a Federal Marshal but a tortured inmate of the institution. The ‘investigation’ is a wild fantasy invented by his sick brain.

This truth is revealed gradually:

One inmate writes the word “Run” on a piece of paper, another inmate tells him: “You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze”

As the film progresses the visions of hell become more and more graphic. The symmetries and coincidences become more fantastic – the island in this film is a refutation of Donne’s assertion that ‘no man is an island’. It turns out Di Caprio's been on the island for 2 years.

The true island in this movie is DiCaprio’s tortured, lost mind. The climactic scene in which he remembers  pulling the dead bodies of his children from the lake where his wife had drowned them gives the audience an appalling vision of the horror he undergoes.

There is probably no greater cinematic taboo than representing the dead bodies of children. That graphic scene is not gratuitous, however. It is entirely legitimate in the context of this depiction of profound, wretched mental suffering. The island – and particularly how it is shown to be a place without hope in the opening scene or how it is shown to be malicious and intelligent in the storm scene – is an essential tool for breaking this taboo.

Scorsese needs an island to delineate the horror, to fence it off, to hold it up. Putting it on the mainland would have required that the normal rules of film making should apply.  

This is not an island that restores the mainland. This is not a repository of healing nostalgia. It is not an island of adventure. It is a nightmare.

An Island of Celtic Barbarians The Wicker Man  Directed by Robin Hardy (1973)

Normal rules do not apply on the island, "Summerisle" in The Wicker Man. It is a pagan insult to the Christian mainland. Its gods are those of the sun and of the crops.  Myth replaces science, kinship replaces bureaucracy, paganism replaces Christianity, promiscuity replaces chastity, feeling replaces reason and in the iconic final scene where the protagonist is burned to death in a wicker man as a sacrifice to the gods of the harvest, the judicial process is replaced by mob execution.

The story: Police Sergeant Howie is an extremely conservative Christian who’s called to the island to investigate the disappearance of a 12 year old girl. His journey to the island sets the scene. He flies there and from the first moment it’s clear that he’s not welcome. His police authority is not respected here.

Gradually he discovers that this is a very odd place:

Walking at night he happens upon couples having sex in a field. This is a profound insult to his Christian values. It gets worse. He goes to a school where he is again appalled to witness a bizarre question and answer session in which the children tell the teacher that the maypole is a ‘phallic symbol...which is venerated in religions such as ours”

The basic point, which is underlined by the dreadful, hippyesque, sub-folk scatological drivel of the film’s soundtrack, is that sex and procreation, in the human, animal and plant kingdoms alike, is the most cherished activity of all – it is sacred.

In passing, it is easy to see that this island is a reflection of the sexual revolution that had been underway for a few years (well, in certain parts of the western world amongst a certain cohort of people at least) and so it’s not really an island where normal rules do not apply!

However, the investigation finds more than the islanders’ ‘alternative’ sexuality. In time Howie begins to suspect that the girl has already or is about to be sacrificed to the ancient gods in order to restore the harvest.

Then, as in Shutter Island the protagonist of Wicker Man is barred from leaving the island – his plane won’t start. It turns out that he’s being kept to be sacrificed to the gods! Sergeant Howie has been lured to the island for this very purpose. The harvest of fruits has failed this year and sacrifice is the only solution.

Howie is burned to death at the end. The island does not attempt to rehabilitate or make right the normal world. Its values are, notwithstanding the hippyesque sexuality, antithetical to those of the state, culture and society of mainland Britain. This island is an outright rejection of the modern world.  

Part of me thinks that this island is a projection of Britain’s fear of and desire for the world of its ‘Celtic’ neighbours and its own Celtic past. Viewed in this way, this island plays around with ideas that are not permitted in the Britain of 1973. The effect is to represent the peripheral as barbaric, highly dangerous, and atavistic

These adjectives – barabaric, dangerous, atavistic - would have been used quite often in 1973 in Britain to describe the ‘wild wests’ of Ireland and Scotland

The Island as Commonwealth Utopia, Thomas More (1516)

Utopia is one of the most famous islands in the history of literature. This island is very much a place where normal rules do not apply

Utopia is claimed by More’s interlocutor, Raphael, to be a true commonwealth: there is no private property, no money, no religious intolerance, no poverty. 

Farming is undertaken by all and production surpluses are shared.

Marriage is protected. Pre-marital sex, adultery and divorce are all frowned upon. Potential husbands and wives are allowed to inspect one another naked prior to marriage as physical deformities are recognised as a serious impediment to marital happiness!

Religious intolerance is a taboo, however, the faithless are not to be trusted : “Who can doubt that  a man who has nothing to fear but the law, and no hope of life beyond the grave, will do anything he can to evade his country’s laws by craft or to break them by violence in order to gratify his own personal greed?”

More’s traveller tells him how Christianity is making headway on the island of Utopia – a very different scenario to the one envisioned on Summerisle!

The founder of Utopia (the king Utopus) was a visionary invader with a keen understanding of the importance of the potency of topography of the island. Indeed, when he conquered the country it was not at that stage an island at all. He “promptly cut a channel fifteen miles wide where their land joined the continent, and thus caused the sea to flow around the country”. In doing this he began the work of building a society that Raphael deems to be ideal:  “Utopus…brought its rude, uncouth inhabitants to such a high level of culture and humanity that they now excel in that regard almost every other people”.

If Utopia is a fantasy of benevolent empire – building at the beginning of the age of exploration, The Wicker Man is an atavistic horror story for the post-industrial, post-colonial age. Both islands reject the evils of their respective epochs although More’s island does not test the limits of its alternative to its epoch as radically as does The Wicker Man.

So at this point:

The island of Utopia teaches; that of The Wicker Man terrifies.

The island of The Tempest restores, that of Shutter Island tells us there is no hope of restoration.

The islands of The Odyssey fill us with joy!